New BIS Certifications Requirement Might Now Delay Phone Launches Even Further

Many of us complain about the delayed phone launches by reputed manufacturers in our country. Initially some phone launches were delayed by 3-4 months, but the situation improved a lot in the recent past. However, a new directive of DeitY (Department of Electronics & Information Technology) might worsen this situation.

What DeitY Wants?

DeitY wants all phones that are to be sold in India to be BIS (Bureau of Indian Standards) certified so that the consumers in India can buy only the tested and high-quality products which are safe for usage. It had also introduced a compulsory BIS certification requirements for a number of gadgets back in 2012, which went into effect from 2013.

And now DeitY wants smartphones and 8 more products categories including power adaptors, UPS, and LED lighting products to be BIS certified for getting the approval for selling in India.

This will mainly help in filtering out low-grade poor quality products which might explode and heat up too much while charging and heavy usage.

What’s The Procedure?

For getting BIS certification for their products, companies first need to get their products tested in BIS recognized labs and then send an application along with the test results for getting BIS certification for the tested product.

How Obtaining BIS Certifications For Phone Might Delay Their Launch?

While the BIS certification procedure sounds simple on paper, it actually is a very time consuming and expensive process. Industry experts say that while the cost of BIS certification forms are cheap, the manufacturers have toshell out lakhs of rupees for purchasing the standards. They also have to pay the cost of testing for each product, which greatly varies with the type of the product and the location of the test centre.

Sudhanshu Kaushuk of ThinkTech Tech Services said that the typical cost for testing a mobile phone can be around Rs. 50,000 and more. Even the same product manufactured in a different factory will have to certified again.

Due to this increased in costs, some companies won’t even launch all their phone models in the country for the simple reason that their testing and certification price won’t justify their local launch. This will happen especially with niche phones which don’t enjoy heavy sales.

“Bad enough that it’s smartphones that need certification but chargers have to be certified separately, this makes planning tougher than it already is,” says a product manager at a multinational smartphone firm.

“To us it seems like a way for the government to push its Make in India agenda by making imports untenable,” he added.

What’s DietY Saying?

A DeitY official said that the companies are complaining about the new norm for smartphone launch because of the increase in price, mainly due to testing for BIS certifications.

He also mentioned that the main reason for introducing BIS certification for gadgets was to guarantee quality products in the Indian market.

India is a country, where several phones are launched in a single week and given the fact that all of these phones will require BIS certification we can expect some delay in their launch date. This can of course be prevented with proper planning but some delay will always be there for some phones due to unforeseeable circumstances.